Posted January 22, 2015
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I like the open world approach. You have the main story moving along, but you have all these side missions that come up. And you can choose what to focus on. It works for me. My game time is fragmented and sometimes short. So, being able to choose what to do at the moment is useful. Plus, even the main story breaks into bite-sized "levels" or challenges or rooms or episodes. So I don't get caught in something too big all at once.
Contrast that with Falskaar, a mod for Skyrim. It's well done. The author used it as his entree into a career. So he's showing off. But, I went into a dungeon and I'm still not out. I've played a couple hours. And I'm still in the dungeon. That can be good when you have 8 or so hours to spend in one chunk. I do not. Once I've made it our of the dungeon I may just leave Falskaar behind. The main Skyrim spaces are also sized pretty well for my needs. A dungeon? An hour or so. A few of the quests are bigger and longer, but they are also broken into smaller chunks and you can put them down and pick them up again later.
It has been interesting to me to watch my gaming values change with my life situation.
It's been so long since I frequently had large chunks of gaming time that I wonder what I would even do if I had a free weekend where I could spend as much time gaming as I wanted. I'm not even sure I would... hmmm...
Either way, most of the missions are manageable in Falskaar, the worst are a couple of quests where you have to go halfway across the island with the Jarl and, his court wizard and his housecarls and they never get the trigger to run, so it takes them hours in-game to get there, fast traveling and waiting won't make them magically appear. It's a really cool mod but it's definitely not perfect.